As Roxalana Druse’s fatal date approached, said the Saturday Globe (an early national paper here mining the product-moving public fascination with mayhem we have noted across the pond), “she has dwindled to a mere shadow of her former self and would hardly tip the scales at 85 pounds.”

Still, this infamous-at-the-time crime would be little more than a piece of period folklore were it not for the horrible end Druse suffered.

Shrieking with terror as she was hooded (so says the New York Times account, which also reports that she deferred her last statement to her Universalist spiritual counselor, who made a general denunciation of the death penalty), Roxalana Druse was hanged on an upward-jerking gallows — and the rope reportedly failed to snap her neck, leaving her to slowly strangle to death.

This botched job in a high-profile hanging intensified pressure on the New York legislature to do away with the gallows; the next year, it became the first jurisdiction in the world to adopt electrocution for death sentences.

And Roxalana? She’s preserved in local lore in Herkimer, where she is said to haunt the courthouse where she heard her sentence.

* Roxalana Druse insisted that her teenage daughter Mary had nothing to do with it. Mary received a prison sentence, and was pardoned in 1895.

The case of Roxalana Druse is my present work-in-progress and is entitled: AN EARNEST APPEAL, The Execution of Roxalana Druse, First and Last Woman Hung In Herkimer County (Based On True Accounts). Anyone desiring a reserve copy of hardcover when published may contact me at anytime.

My husband was doing some ancestry research and as soon as we saw pictures of her….we knew he was related to her. It’s uncanny how much he resembles her. I’d like to read your book when it’s published.

It is ironic that Governor Hill stated in his first inaugural address that he regarded this mode of punishment (hanging) as barbaric yet failed to commute the execution of a woman by the same method he so abhorred!